You are not your own
Identity, authenticity, and Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 1
At a breakfast event at our church a few months ago, Dave Beelen recommended a book by Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World.
It’s the best book I’ve read in a long time.
Here’s a summary of my notes, in bullet form.
If you are your own, then:
You must define your identity and find your own meaning.
The explanation for your existence is up to you.
There is no outside help in discerning what is right or wrong. Morality comes from within.
Your purpose is yours to determine.
The worst thing you can do is not pursue your desires, aims, goals, and ends.
The most authentic way you can live is to choose your identity.
Your are stuck between your inward-focused desire to find yourself and the outward-focused need to find justification by others.
But you are not your own, so:
You belong, body and soul, to someone else, to God, to others.
Your belonging carries risk—of being taken advantage of, of being used, of being hurt and hurting others.
You can be yourself, but your value doesn’t come from you.
You have duties, limits, and obligations to yourself and others.
You can take comfort in the constraints on your life.
The meaning in your life is objective, external, and real.
And this:
“For myself, the greatest comfort in belonging to Christ is that the things most central to my experience of life find their home. Love, beauty, justice, joy, guilt, pleasure, longing, sorrow, delight—it is these things, not in the abstract but in particular moments and with particular people, that give life most of its grandeur. I know I can find alternate frameworks to explain the love I feel toward my wife or the pleasure I experience reading a great novel or the righteous indignation that fills me when I witness injustice. But none of those accounts can avoid impoverishing the very things I find most true about life. In Christ I take comfort that the truest things in life are real things.”
Finally, a programming note: I’m traveling next week, so the next email will hit your inbox on Monday, June 3.
Thanks for reading,
Kent
It would be interesting to explore what you mean when you say, :"The meaning in your life is objective, external, and real."
Do you mean that you can point to it, pick it up, turn it over, and examine its contours? Do you mean that meaning is objective, external, and real in the sense of being a tangible, material thing?
The language of objectivity is slippery. If you are going to sustain the claim that meaning is objective, you are going to have to carefully distinguish it from what we usually mean by objectivity, i.e., observability.
You are going to have to do that for two reasons. First, there's the empirical objection: it's obviously true that morality isn't objective in the same way that plants and animals or rivers and streams, or sun, moon, and stars are objective. And second, there's the religious objection: the biblical texts themselves command us not to identify God, who is the source of all meaning, with plants and animals or rivers and streams, or sun, moon, and stars.
And you will also have to deal with the words of Jesus Christ, who says, The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.
So, what is meant by saying meaning is objective, external, and real? I suggest that this isn't a question of whether meaning is objective or subjective. It's not one or the other; it's both. At least, that what is meant when the Heidelberg Catechism says, "I belong body and soul..." A person's body is the ground of their objective knowledge while the soul is the seat of their subjective consciousness of self. Thus the preaching of the Gospel (objective, external, etc.) must be accompanied by the work of the Holy Spirit (subjective, internal, etc.) if the Gospel is to have effect in a person's life.
In any case, I don't think it wise to insist on something that is completely unintelligible to persons who don't already buy "our" way of talking about things. It's better to start by acknowledging that meaning is subjective, but that doesn't mean it is meaningless.
(Thanks for posting this. I appreciate the oppourtunity to think through what is written above. I never got to do it while I was in school.)